• • •

Over the next two weeks, I can see Kat retreating into silence to work out her mother’s absence; I have learned this is her way of coming to terms with events she cannot control. We all have to find a way to do that, don’t we? She has found this one. Who of us can say it isn’t a good way? We imagine together each night before bed—me with words and she with thoughts—where Candace’s carriage might be. We picture her on the desolate landscape of Arizona and New Mexico and then maybe finding the gateway to heaven on her journey. I think it brings Kat comfort to think of her mother as skyward bound, like Elijah in a chariot. She has drawn several pictures of a carriage pulled by winged horses flying into the sun.

I don’t know if she fully understands she will not see Candace again, but I find her often at the peach tree, looking up at its branches and listening to the rustle of its leaves.

On the tenth of September we receive a telegram from Texas and learn that Candace died three days after arriving.

29

September slips into October like it did the previous autumn in this part of California—subtly and with nowhere near the kind of fanfare as in New York or northern Ireland.

I enroll Kat in the little primary school in San Rafaela with some trepidation; she is silent most days, still puzzling out the loss of her mother through the absence of words. I tell her teacher, a Miss Reeves, that my daughter has had to suffer much in her young life and to please, if she could, adjust her expectations. I’m expecting her to tell me to take Kat home like that headmistress did back in San Francisco, but Miss Reeves says Kat is more than welcome in class, and it will be nice for a change to have a child who doesn’t interrupt instruction time with out-of-turn talking. Kat seems neither eager nor hesitant to attend school. She is interested in learning—she has always been—and after the first few days the other children seem to accept the quiet new girl; at least this is what Miss Reeves tells me.

Our new life at the Loralei is tranquil in so many ways. I know I should be more distressed at Candace’s passing, but the fact that she is gone has loosened fetters that had been bound around my heart. Kat is thoroughly mine now, the way I thought she was when I married Martin.

The trust checks from the Los Angeles bank begin to arrive—one a month—in the middle of September. It is more money than Kat and I need to contribute to our board and lodging at the inn, and it occurs to me that in a year or so there might be enough surplus for me to pay Elliot to build Kat and me a cottage on the property, if Belinda will allow it, and I am almost certain she will. Belinda would then have back two of her rooms for inn guests and Kat will have her own home always, no matter where life might take me.